Free State of Wonder by Ann Patchett Page A

small heroine disappeared completely. Naïveté may be the bedrock of reproduction, the lynchpin for the survival of the species. Even Marina, who understood all of this, was still able to think that Mr. Fox was possibly, obliquely, suggesting they might marry.
    Marina had been married once herself, though she didn’t think it counted for much of anything now. They had married in the beginning of their third year of residency and divorced at the end of the fifth, and in the two and a half years that intervened they were virtually never awake at the same time. Marina often thought that if it hadn’t been for the wedding, which was modest, it would have simply been a failed relationship with a nice man she really never thought of anymore. She had been naïve herself, thinking that they could make a marriage work at that particularly difficult point in their training, despite the fact that everyone they knew had told them otherwise. She was certain that love would prevail, and when it didn’t, she had lost not only her marriage but her ingenuous self. Marina and her husband bought their own divorce kit at an office supply store and amicably filled out the paperwork at the kitchen table. He took the bedroom furniture, she took the living room furniture. In a gesture of kindness, she offered up the kitchen table and the chairs that they sat in, and because he knew she meant it kindly he accepted. Her mother flew to Baltimore to help her find a smaller apartment and pack up half of the wedding gifts that she hadn’t wanted in the first place. What Marina had wanted very much was the chance to lie on the sofa in the living room and maybe drink a glass of scotch while crying in the afternoon but there wasn’t time. She had turned thirty the week before. She had six hours left before she had to be back at the hospital. The thing that Marina was feeling the end of so acutely, the thing that made her want to take to the sofa in the middle of the day, was not the end of her marriage but the end of her residency in obstetrics and gynecology. Four years into her five-year program she had switched to clinical pharmacology, enrolled in a Ph.D. program, and doomed herself to another three years of school. Even though her mother had come to Baltimore to help her through her divorce, Marina didn’t tell her what it was she was actually breaking up with. She didn’t tell her that the life she had ruined was not her own nor Josh Su’s but someone else’s, someone she didn’t even know. She did not tell her mother about the accident, nor about the Spanish Inquisition that had followed. She did not tell her about the switch to pharmacology until she was a year into the program and then she mentioned it so casually that it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. She did not tell her mother about Dr. Swenson.
    Marina pulled her coat around her shoulders. Beneath the plane was a soft white bank of clouds that shielded passengers from the landscape below. There was no telling where they were now. She let her head tip back and thought that no harm could come from the smallest sip of sleep. She knew how to close her eyes for two minutes. It was a magic trick she had picked up in her residency, falling asleep in the corner of an elevator and then waking up on the right floor. She would give her head a quick shake and then walk straight to the patient’s room, not exactly refreshed but, for the moment, reinforced. She pressed the button on the armrest and let her seat recline. She set her internal alarm for five minutes and gave in to the sleep that had been pulling at her since the nightmares had thrown her out of bed this morning. But this time when the elevator doors opened she was not in Calcutta. She was at Vogel, looking down the hallway at the tile floor and humming lights, and suddenly she changed her mind about everything. She should have told Anders about Dr. Swenson. It was hard to see what bearing her story would have on his